Case Number 06088

DRACULA 3000

The Charge

In space, there is no daylight.

Opening Statement

De Niro and Pacino in Heat. Newman and Redford in Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid. Van Dien and Coolio in Dracula 3000. One of these
things is not like the other...one of these things just doesn't belong.

Facts of the Case

A deep space salvage ship discovers a derelict freighter inhabited by a
vampire. Much running around ensues.

The Evidence

Dracula 3000 is a shining example of complete filmmaking ineptitude.
You can look all you want and you won't find even the slightest hint of
intelligence on any level.

I think this is supposed to be a horror film, but, other than the fact that
it somehow got made, there's nothing scary about it. There's no gore, and hardly
any blood. There's no sex or nudity, which leads me to wonder why Erika Eleniak
was cast. What audience did the people responsible for this piece of crap have
in mind? Is there an audience for something like this? It's not even bad in a
good sort of way; it's not the kind of movie you can mock while you're watching
it, so there's absolutely no fun to be had. All you can do is warn people to
steer clear of it, and that's exactly what I intend to do.

Take a look at the cast. Would you believe Casper Van Dien (The Omega
Code) as the captain of a starship? Come on. (I've always believed Paul
Verhoeven's casting of Van Dien in Starship Troopers was actually a
joke.) What about Erika Eleniak (Under Siege) as Van Dien's android
co-captain? Well, if your captain's a complete moron, I guess a bubble-headed
bleach-blonde could act as his second-in-command (Eleniak's black tank-top and
leather pants turn in nice performances, though). Or how about bad rapper/bad
actor Coolio (Tapped Out) as...well, I'm not exactly sure what his
character is supposed to be (all he does is get stoned), but he purportedly has
an IQ of 187, which I don't buy. Here's all you need to know about Coolio's
performance: Imagine Chris Tucker as Gollum. You also get Tiny Lister
(Friday) as Humvee, the ship's resident muscleman; Lister simply walks
around wearing his trademark scowl and complaining about the fact that he and
Coolio are the only black members of the crew. Alexandra Kamp (Half Past
Dead) is the ship's navigator, meaning she has nothing to do during the
second half of the film, which, given her acting abilities, is a good thing.
Grant Swanby (Tarzan and the Lost City) is the Professor, the ship's
wheelchair-bound engineer, which means he gets to sit around and sweat a lot
once the vampire gets loose. Udo Kier (Suspiria) is the captain of the
derelict freighter, and he only appears as part of a videotaped captain's log
(lucky him). Rounding out this stellar cast is Langley Kirkwood (Red
Water) as the vampire. Kirkwood seems to have drawn inspiration (and I use
that term loosely) from Frank Langella's performance in the 1979 version of
Dracula as well as George Hamilton's work in Love at First Bite.
Needless to say, I don't exactly see a bright future ahead of him.

What about the writing? The script is full of awful dialogue, lapses in
logic, and there's no ending (more on that later). Get this: Van Dien's
character is named Abraham Van Helsing. Clever, huh? Kamp's character is named
Mina. Can you guess what happens to her? The derelict freighter carrying the
vampire is the Demeter. Wait, it gets better. Before its sudden
disappearance, the Demeter had been returning from the planet
Transylvania in the Carpathia solar system. Pretty big clues at to
what its cargo might be, huh? Thing is, nobody in Van Dien's crew knows what a
vampire is. Why? Because otherwise the movie would be over in twenty minutes (I
should be so lucky). It's mentioned early on that the Earth's government has
abolished all forms of Christianity, which is why almost no one knows what a
crucifix is, but how could nobody know what a vampire is? You're telling me that
five hundred years from now people will know what a Humvee is, but nobody will
know anything about vampires? (To make things even more illogical, Eleniak's
character makes a reference to The Bionic Woman. Nice to know the
classics will live on.) How does Van Dien's character not know about his
ancestry? You'd think something like that would have come up at some point in
his life. What, nobody at the family reunions wanted to talk about it? Why are
most of the coffins in the Demeter's cargo hold filled with sand? Does
the vampire need to transport some native soil to his new home? Well, if that's
the case, then think about the kind of places you're likely to find sand. Would
it make sense for a vampire to live in such a place? Also, what's the vampire
been feeding on all these years? The Demeter has apparently been missing
for fifty years, so it seems unlikely he could have been feeding on the crew for
that length of time. Oh, yeah, one more thing, Van Dien and Eleniak eventually
figure out what's going on, and they go into the ship's cargo hold in an attempt
to kill the vampire (using pool cues, in case you were wondering). They don't
know which coffin is the vampire's, so they start breaking all of them open. Is
it just me, or in a case like this would you look for the one coffin that
isn't nailed shut?

Okay, so how about the direction? Director Darrell James Roodt (who also
helmed the Patrick Swayze classic Fatherhood) shoots three-fourths of the
film in two-shots and close-ups, probably in an attempt to cover up the shoddy
nature of the sets (doesn't work). Roodt also thinks he can create tension by
placing his camera in the middle of an empty corridor and shaking it. Oooh,
there's nothing more menacing than an unstable, empty frame. Who's funding this
guy? Well, judging from the credits, the financiers for this crap are some of
the same people who finance all that shot in South Africa crap shown on SciFi.
(This proves it -- the only good thing to come out of South Africa in the past
thirty years is Charlize Theron.) Remember what I said earlier about the ending,
or rather the lack thereof? Okay, so all the good guys are dead except for
Eleniak and Lister. The ship is set on a course for a twin-sun system, in hopes
that all that sunlight will seep in and kill the vampire. Thing is, it's a
twelve-hour trip, and Lister and Eleniak are trying to find a way to kill some
time. Eleniak tells Lister that she was originally programmed to be a pleasure
'bot. Lister, who has spent much of the movie making lewd comments to her,
smiles, picks her up, and takes her off to hump her. The ship blows up as soon
as Lister moves out of the frame. That right, it just blows up (in a rather
cheesy-looking canned-gasoline explosion, I might add). Thanks, Darrell. Jeez,
talk about contempt for your audience.

Alright, so how's the audio/video presentation? Well, it's crappy, too; the
overall look is on par with a videotaped television broadcast. The transfer is
incredibly grainy and murky, with some of the worst black levels I've ever
seen. The audio is supposed to be a stereo mix, but it's really tinny
sounding two-channel mono. The dialogue is very poorly recorded, with the actors
all sounding like they're trapped inside a well. There are no extras.

Closing Statement

It sucks. Dracula 3000 makes Leprechaun 4: In Space look like
Alien.

The Verdict

It's so guilty not even a California jury could exonerate it. Feel free to
laugh at me for having volunteered to watch it. Court is adjourned.